Question: What's the Difference Between Negative & Positive Atheism?
Answer: The difference between negative atheism and positive atheism depends on just how far a person is willing to go in rejecting belief in gods. Whereas negative atheism means simply that a person doesn't believe in the existence of any gods, positive atheism means that a person has taken the extra step of asserting that no gods exist.
All atheists are at least negative atheists because all atheists, by definition, lack belief in the existence of any gods. In fact the definition of negative atheism is the same as the broad, general definition of atheism itself. Negative atheism is used as a term to distinguish between those atheists form whom only the basic definition applies and those for whom a narrower definition also applies.
The labels explicit atheism / implicit atheism and explicit atheist / implicit atheist mirror the more popular labels strong atheism / weak atheism and strong atheist / weak atheist. The former are more common in philosophy and scholarly literature whereas the latter tend to be much more common in popular literature and casual conversations.
